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Indecision and its uses
Colloquium| Speaker: | Marty Scharlemann, UC Santa Barbara |
| Location: | 693 Kerr |
| Start time: | Mon, Oct 25 2004, 4:10PM |
Description
To understand the structure of a 3-manifold it is useful to understand
the surfaces it contains. Particularly helpful are surfaces that
can't be simplified (called "incompressible" surfaces). But what if there are no
such surfaces? Instead of incompressible surfaces, it is sometimes possible to use
surfaces
that are extremely compressible. The idea is this: finding it hard to decide how to
compress
can substitute for not being able to compress at all. If time allows, I'll also
discuss
the natural analogue for this phenomenon in knot theory.